What kind of people made the cave art in France and Spain?
The cave art is part of this whole Cro-Magnon behavioral explosion. The creators of that art were clearly modern people, not modern in a historical sense, but people with modern behavioral abilities. I can’t think of a better example that you could put forward of the origin or the presence very early on of modern behavioral symbolic activities. What the art meant is a different question. It is to be experienced rather than explained. What is the human capacity? We are still discovering what the human capacity is. The human capacity is everything that makes us unique. And with every year that goes by we are exploring our capacities in new ways. We don’t know yet what the human capacity is. When did hominids first display the human capacity? Basically the earliest evidence we have is from the Cro-Magnon in Europe, but there is inferential evidence from the very early occupation of Australia 60 thousand years ago by people who must have been quit extraordinary navigators to get there then
